PEOFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY:

            Ever since my studies for the B.A. degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1980s, I have been interested in religious history, and especially in the history of Catholicism. At Princeton University I majored in French late medieval and early modern history, and wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the cult of the saints in Paris.

            Since then, I have been pursuing different topics in religious, cultural, and social history of early modern European history. I wrote two Hebrew textbooks on topics related to religious history of Europe for the Open University of Israel. One dealt with The Catholic Reformation, and the other with magic and witchcraft.

            My major research project over the last six years has been a systematic examination of the connections between demonic possession and female spirituality in early modern Catholicism.  I recently submitted the final and revised draft to the University of Chicago Press, and it is due to be published in January 2007. The book covers the entire Catholic universe (including Latin America, as well as all the European Catholic countries), and makes use of all sorts of primary sources. The main arguments of the books are as follows:

Demonic possession and exorcism were extremely common events in the late medieval and early modern period, and the historiography that deals with the issue has presented them, wrongly, as rare occurrences. By so doing, the current literature has obscured a religious/medical practice that was an integral part of the Catholic (and, in fact, Christian) healing system.

Secondly, the Catholic Church neither paid much attention to exorcism and to the different methods employed by exorcists, nor did it restrict the performance of exorcism to priests until the later years of the sixteenth century. It was only by the late sixteenth century, due to new definitions of “superstition” and to the competition with the reformed branches of Christianity, that exorcism “became important,” its rites standardized, and its use restricted to priests.

But a third cause for the growing attention paid to demonic possession and exorcism had to do with a longer term development: Spirit possession became troublesome when more and more lay women started to claim spiritual (divine) possession, and gained growing popularity as prophetesses and mystics. Threatened by this feminization of the access to the divine, the church developed, for the first time in its history, a method for the discernment of possessing spirits. Since the morphology of both divine and demonic possessions was similar, as the number of claimants for spiritual access to the divine grew, the church was more and more likely to discern their possessing spirits as malevolent rather than benevolent.

            It was the systematic study of methods of discernment that led me to my current project. It is a common assumption in almost all the historiography of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity that Protestantism made a unique contribution to the creation of the modern world as we know it.  My new project argues that some of the major characteristic of modernity that are attributed to Protestantism, were, in fact, part and parcel of early modern Catholicism.  I intend to examine at least three aspects of the project: the birth of the modern and introspective self; the development of new systems of discernment of difference; and the coming into being of a public sphere.  At this point I am still in a very preliminary stage of collecting material and reading, but have recently published a theoretical article delineating the general framework of my argument.